27. Return to Quezon City

Hi Everyone,

Leaving Baguio, Heide and I took the seven-hour bus ride back to Manila. With the twists and turns on the mountain roads and the usual stop and start of Philippine driving, I threw up as usual. I had gotten used to carrying little plastic bags in my back pocket. I also carried a few pesos in my pocket. We stopped maybe twice on the long ride and I needed the money to get into the "comfort" room. Also, sometimes vendors would come onto the bus during these stops. I just loved little bags of roasted peanuts with garlic chunks. Usually bags of spicy roasted peanuts cost 20 pesos (around 40 cents).



When the bus finally arrived in Manila, I took this photo of a building-in-progress. After Manila, we took a short car ride to Quezon City. To me it's fascinating that everything is built of concrete.




Well, not everything... Here is a building built only of plastic. It's for kids of course. Outside the house is Nieva Subong, owner of the NS Montessori School in Quezon City. Heide is inside the plastic house playing like a kid. The plastic house is, in turn, within Nieva's Montessori school. This is a nice contrast to the "house that dwarfed the kid" that we saw back in Baguio. I think this "little house" is within our budget. It would be easy to change the light bulbs too.




Here's Nieva enjoying a class in session.





We happened to walk into a class where the students were acting out a story about a group of monkeys wearing caps. There are real monkeys in the Philippines and we saw some on our visit to Corregidor. That's our next chapter. None, as far as I could tell, wore caps. So much for "reality"!

Here's a video of the students acting out the monkey story.





Finally, we settle in Nieva and Roger's house. It's built out of concrete, of course. It's so big that the wifi couldn't reach our bedroom, which was air conditioned. Instead we had to hang out in these rooms with our laptops in 86 degree heat-- a drastic change from the chill of Baguio.

At this point we were exhausted from our travels and just wanting to hang out for a few days in this beautiful house and with these wonderful hosts before flying back to the United States. However, Nieva and Roger convinced us that we shouldn't leave without a visit to Corregidor.




Duane and Heide.